REVVED UP: The Yankees' spring training opens Wednesday in Tampa -- but Joba Chamberlain was in Florida a little early, taking in the Daytona 500 yesterday, 121 miles to the east.Getty Images

VANCOUVER — In the United States, curling is a curiosity. In Canada, it’s an obsession.

The Canucks are crazy about the sport where you throw a heavy stone down a sheet of ice, with your teammates sweeping the ice in front of it toward a target.

The members of the Canadian team are treated like rock stars, unable to walk down the street without getting recognized. One is even considered one of Canada’s most eligible bachelors.

“Curling is hugely popular in Canada,” said Don Dugoid, a Canadian curling legend who will serve as NBC’s analyst here. “The climate has a lot do with it and it’s a sport families get involved with. If your father was a curler, you naturally became a curler.”

Of the 1.5 million curlers in the world, a million of them call Canada home. The United States has 15,000 curlers by comparison.

There was an awkward moment this week during the Canadian curling team’s press conference when an American reporter asked them how it would feel to finally get some TV attention. Apparently she didn’t know that curling is on TV here every weekend. The question drew laughs from the Canadian press corps.

Curling has been an Olympic sport since 1998, so this will be the first Olympic curling competition on Canadian soil. That just ratchets up the pressure on Canadian skip Kevin Martin when play begins tomorrow.

Competitions here sometimes draw more than 10,000 people. At the Olympics, the venue seats just 5,600, causing a demand for tickets.

In the United States, the sport remains something that gets some attention for two weeks every four years.

There are signs the sport is growing, though. U.S. skip John Shuster was in Los Angeles last month to film a segment on “The Jay Leno Show.” While there, he visited the Hollywood Curling Club and conducted an open house for 142 people. Curling in Southern California would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

“It gave me energy to see all those people as excited about this sport as I am,” Shuster said.

Shuster, like the rest of the American team, hails from Minnesota, the state where the sport is most popular. He was part of the 2006 bronze medal team, the first Americans to win a curling medal.

Shuster and his teammates try to grow the sport whenever possible. But in Vancouver they are concentrating on winning.

“Our job is to represent our country and we want to do that well,” Shuster said. “If we do that I expect our sport to grow.”